The King looked out at the raging sea beating the rocky coast beneath the castle’s walls. His quickly aging face was mostly hidden beneath a long, birchwood-white beard and shoulder-length salt and pepper hair. But if one looked close enough, they could see how his deep, sea-blue eyes had gathered unwelcome years in the five years of his reign. He was beset on all sides with problems. The thought kept roaming through his mind, the thought that had forever sickened him to his power: now I am fully become man, child of Loki, with all the inclinations of a child, but with wealth, power, and war within my grasp. This power he had—this power over the lives of others, over their property, their families—he didn’t know how much longer he could hold onto it; he feared what other, more malicious men than he, would do if they were to gain hold of his power. He threw a fist-sized chunk of rock that had fallen from the wall into the depths of the sea below him, and with it his worrisome thoughts on power.
He turned, looking to retreat to the warm, blazing fire of his hearth and the horn of mead that would surely be waiting for him there—not hearing the soft footsteps that had approached quietly from behind—and found his son’s deep-blue eyes staring into his, with the blade of a dagger plunged into his stomach. The old man looked calmly into his son’s eyes, ignoring the pain that his insides were screaming at him to mend—he had received many wounds in battle before, and the pain he now felt was all too familiar. He kissed his son’s brow, and uttered the words that would forever haunt his son: “Now, all this is yours. May you rule it better than I.”
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His son twisted the blade, causing the old man to let out a stifled groan, and removed it. “I love you for who you once were,” he whispered in his father’s ear before tossing his body over the castle wall into the wild sea below. There would be no burial rights for this king, his father. The gods knew what his father had done, and the stout, stalwartly Prince was a messenger for them.
The old magik needed to be restored to the dark from whence it had come.